Best known for his novel Call Me by Your Name, André Aciman has written a gorgeous account of the time his family, all refugees from Egypt, spent in Rome before they relocated to the United States so that he could attend college.
André’s relationship with his parents is particularly moving. His philandering father, whose globetrotting is at least partially inspired by his not wanting to live with his wife, speaks to the teenage André without a trace of judgment, less as a father than as another self. He advises André to pursue his literary passion. André’s temperamental mother is deaf, and he helps her maneuver their new surroundings in Rome, acting as her translator, coconspirator, and protector.
But it’s perhaps André’s younger brother, a minor character in the book, who truly understands him best, forever teasing him for “romanticizing.” Roman Year is a portrait of the romancier, the novelist, as a young man. André delights in the way his cosmopolitan family manages to cram words from multiple languages — including Greek, Arabic, Italian, and French — into single sentences. He spends much of the year in bookstores and in bed reading novels; and while he suspects toward the end of his Roman stay that reading might have been a way to shield himself from the city and even from himself, he also realizes he’s been learning how to tap into his favorite authors’ visions by making them his own.
Although the Acimans aren’t religious Jews, their Jewishness informs their destiny. Like other so-called Egyptianized groups, they were forced from Egypt in the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps it’s the Six-Day War, in June 1967, that puts Aciman most in touch with his Jewishness: he instinctively fears for Israel’s survival when it’s threatened by an Egypt that never really accepted its Jews. “All the anti-Zionist poems I’d had to learn in school and all the antisemitic propaganda I’d lived with … had suddenly emerged in Rome and revealed a scar that had never really healed.”
But young André is a kind of existential refugee, someone never at home anywhere. “My mother was not a home, my brother was not a home, and Via Clelia certainly wasn’t a home,” he writes after rambling through the old city one day. Through the people he meets and the bookstores he frequents, he comes to know Rome not just as the shabby place where his family lives, but also as the eternal one that tourists know. In the end, he wonders whether he saw Rome as it actually was, or whether he saw it through the scrim of romance, as a place he invented with the help of the books and movies he loved.
Call Me by Your Name has become a touchstone for gay men of all ages, and these fans will be interested in the gay content in Roman Year. Aciman flirts and fools around with neighborhood girls and sleeps with a female sex worker in Paris. Once, on a crowded bus in Rome, a man embraces him from behind — an odd and sensual experience that André tries to prolong by willing the passenger to turn and look at him once they both manage to find seats. The stranger continues to stare ahead and lives on only in André’s fantasies; it’s a wonderfully unresolved episode, just like life itself. Later, he befriends Gianlorenzo, a young man who works in a neighborhood store, and their final goodbye is the most moving of the book’s many farewells.
At the end of Roman Year, when Aciman returns to Rome with his own sons, he suspects how unsatisfying the trip down memory lane must be for them; it is for him as well. He tells his children about “Amina, Sabina, Paola, Gianlorenzo and his sister, the Roma girl, and the girl in the turquoise overcoat,” but he doesn’t believe he was in love with any of them. Then he wonders, of his sons, “Had I told them the whole truth? Would they know? Would they dust off the footprints I’d buried in the hope they’d ask the right question, knowing that, if they asked, they’d have already guessed the answer?” That’s what Roman Year is for Aciman — more a way to ask the right questions than to get at the truth. Young André is full of love for everyone and everything around him — relatives, friends, places, books — though as a lover, he doubts his constancy, never trusting that his “love was genuine or simply a product of my own yearnings.”
Jason K. Friedman is the author of the story collection Fire Year, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award. His article on the Solomon Cohen family, published in Moment magazine, won an American Jewish Press Association Award. He lives in San Francisco, with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.
